In modern Australia, why must caring for your family come second to your work duties?
Caring is harder than work. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. The hardest thing about work is organising how to do it around caring commitments. I’m lucky that my “portfolio career” of endlessly-juggled subcontracting means that I can file this article on the train on the way to deliver clean laundry to my mum in hospital. Hundreds of thousands of other Australians cannot.
For all its exertions, mental and physical, work at least exists in the realm of the quantifiable. There is a repetition of tasks, a completion of duties, a schedule of hours.
Human beings, however, are chaotic – and the unpredictable, contingent, constantly shifting chaos of care observes no rigid timetable, obeys no agreed agenda. “That’s not in my statement of duties” is not something a parent can announce to the universe when all their children come down with gastro infections in the middle of the night. “I’ve got a scheduling conflict, sorry” doesn’t really cut it when your dad collapses on the stairs and puts his head through the wall.
Even in the service professions that have the most contact with messy humanity, the shift finally ends, the till is closed, the bar shuts. Mass gastroenteritis, heads through walls and every other permutation of the unpredictable and inconvenient are dispatched beyond the realm of immediate personal obligation.
Yet in the nutty calculus of the modern industrial workplace, it is the containable, reschedulable world of work that makes itself inflexible to the humans required to make it run. Decades of union-busting, condition-stripping, low wages, “casualisation” and punitive industrial laws have combined with the brutal algorithms of digital shift allocation to disempower workers and remove management discretion to negotiate accommodations for their staff. “Workplace flexibility” is an industrial euphemism for shedding staff who have the temerity to exist beyond their job. It has freed employers from human responsibility towards workers – and made their workers prisoners to an impossible reconciliation of workplace and family demands.
The reality of aggregating bad shifting and exploitative conditions means that if the simple maths of time and space doesn’t work out for someone with caring responsibilities, they, their skills and experience are forced out of workplaces.
Some are forced out of the workforce altogether. The old neocon rhetoric that “anyone who wants a job can get a job” meets a swift contradiction in recent reports that there are now 200,000 Australians who certainly want to work but can’t find workplaces that can accommodate their care commitments. Strangely, they just can’t seem to deny their hospitalised mothers clean laundry, leave their dads out cold on the stairs or abandon their sick kids to a puddle of soiled sheets.
It’s simultaneously the case that the hospitality sector is looking for 100,000 workers to meet demand in a reopening, post-lockdown economy. And the agricultural sector also claims it needs 22,000 workers to meet its own staffing shortfalls.
One might look to the spare capacity of willing workers and then to these labour demands and think, you know, hang on, maybe there’s some kind of structural solution here. Maybe we could collect tax and disburse it through a variety of governmentsponsored professionalised support for people’s caring commitments.
We could relieve families of intersecting economic, industrial and domestic pressure, simultaneously create local jobs, as well as hugely boost local productivity. Just spitballing here, but we could call it “childcare” or “aged care” or “disability services” and it could be community-based, sometimes home-based and maybe even in the workplace.
I mean, one might think that based on logic and evidence and the whole point of a government … but that’s not where Australian politics is at with the Liberals at the helm. Rather than invest in a collective solution, the “cando capitalists” of Australian industry are not up for doing much beyond restarting the practice of importing vulnerable and exploitable temporary migrant workers and the government is going along with it.
None of this with a pathway to citizenship for these people, mind you. That comes with the dangerous industrial risk of gaining the right to vote and un-electing governments who exploit you.
Last week, the federal Labor opposition announced their policy to boost access to funded childcare and early childhood education. The statement made the politically rare analogy of comparing investment in childcare to that of infrastructure in road and rail.
We may be unused to this language in the public policy debate about care provision, but it’s familiar enough in households that do the actual caring. Maintaining income and managing work is only half of the economic equation of care. The other half is bringing fresh laundry to an oncology ward and understanding that walking away from the people who need us the most is a cost we just will not bear.
In the nutty calculus of the workplace, it is the containable, reschedulable world of work that makes itself inflexible